The use of electronic devices to read books, newspapers and magazines has become increasingly commonplace due to the numerous significant advantages afforded by such devices over conventional paper print. For example, comparing to paper print, an electronic reading device can hold much a greater amount of information, allow immediate access to new books, personalize the reading display format, and facilitate night reading, etc. Electronic reading devices can be implemented as dedicated reading devices, e.g., e-readers, as well as general-purpose electronic devices such as desktops, laptops and hand-held computers.
A user often needs to glean information through searching from documents, rather than reading line by line, for purposes of research, education, recording, inventory, evidence discovery, reference, citation, etc. Conventional book reading software allow a user to submit a search query through a graphical user interface (GUI), e.g., to discover information related to a query term. Then the book is presented in a different format with the pages without the query term removed, allowing the user to navigate through the search results page by page for convenience. A user can also search on the Internet through a web search engine which presents the search results in search result webpages.
However, the search results yielded from either an Internet search query or a book search query are usually presented to a user in a non-editable format. If the user wants to save the search results, he or she typically has to manually open a file (e.g., a Microsoft Word file) and manually copy/paste the search results one by one, or page by page. Then the file can be manipulated in a text processor. When a user needs to search a large amount of information, this process can become time consuming and even cumbersome. Moreover, the conventional text processor is not specially designed for editing search results, may remove formatting and thus lacks convenient functions enabling users to organize and manage search results efficiently.